Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Bible

• The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by the church and the Sabbath school, so that it seemed, before I read it, to be the yellowest book in the catalogue. Yet I early escaped from their meshes. It was hard to get the commentaries out of one's head and taste its true flavor. [...] It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the Life of Christ because the book has been edited by Christians.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Bible, Christian, Dream

  "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers". Book by Henry David Thoreau, 1849.

• The book has never been written which is to be accepted without any allowance.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Bible, Book, Accepted

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.491, Simon and Schuster

• The New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality; the best of the Hindoo Scripture, for its pure intellectuality. The readeris nowhere raised into and sustained in a higher, purer, or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagvat-Geeta.... It is unquestionably one of the noblest and most sacred scriptures which have come down to us.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Bible, Sacred Scripture, Morality

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.112, Courier Corporation

• For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Bible, Light, Years

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.211, Graphic Arts Books

• The newspaper is a Bible which we read every morning and every afternoon, standing and sitting, riding and walking. It is a Biblewhich every man carries in his pocket, which lies on every table and counter, and which the mail, and thousands of missionaries, are continually dispersing. It is, in short, the only book which America has printed, and which America reads. So wide is its influence.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Bible, Morning, Lying

• As for me, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are now only the subtlest imaginable essences, which would not stain the morning sky.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Bible, Morning, Essence

• Yet the New Testament treats of man and man's so-called spiritual affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to alone content me, who am not interested solely in man's religious or moral nature, or in man even.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Bible, Spiritual, Religious

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.96, Penguin

• There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains itsmaxims. It has no temple, nor even a solitary column. There goes a rumor that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore. The hunter has found only fragments of pottery and the monuments of inhabitants.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Friendship, Bible, Rumor

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.188, Xist Publishing

• A healthy man, with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subjectfor Christianity. The New Testament may be a choice book to him on some, but not on all or most of his days. He will rather go a-fishing in his leisure hours. The Apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland streams.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Bible, Faith, Book

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.96, Penguin

You May Also Like:

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Walt Whitman

Margaret Fuller

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Leo Tolstoy

Herman Melville

Mahatma Gandhi